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Wednesday, May 23, 2012

“I’ve been driven by goals”

Ellen MacArthur, Founder of the Ellen MacArthur Foundation, was in
Paris this week to speak on entrepreneurship and skills at the OECD Forum. She
was interviewed by Marilyn Achiron, Editor of the Education Department.

In 2001, a 24-year-old Ellen MacArthur fulfilled a 20-year dream and
sailed, single-handedly non-stop around the world in the Vendée Globe. Not only
did she achieve her goal, she also came in second in one of the hardest races
in sailing. Three years later, she broke the speed record for circumnavigating
the globe, alone, on a trimaran.

Today, MacArthur has set herself another challenge: to change,
fundamentally, how we think about and use the world’s resources. The Ellen MacArthur Foundation, established in 2010, links education and business in a drive towards a circular
economy. The idea of the circular economy is based on “systems thinking”, the
acknowledgement that nothing occurs in a vacuum; that context matters. And the
context we’re all living in right now is that of finite natural resources.

When asked, MacArthur says she is driven by goals; but that seems only
half the story: the other half is passion. You hear it when she speaks
of her first sailing experience, as a 4-year-old, with her “auntie”: “It was
the greatest feeling of freedom I could ever imagine. That boat could have
taken us anywhere in the world.” And you hear it when she speaks of her work
now: “The ‘big click’ happened when I first started to understand the circular
economy. It’s a whole different system. Suddenly I had the same feeling I had
as a 4-year-old.”

In her 20s, the context of MacArthur’s life was the confines of
impossibly small vessels. “You realise what ‘finite’ means; how you behave when
you have limited resources.” Now, the context may seem far larger, but the
constraints are no less challenging: “We don’t have enough resources to sustain
our economy. You can re-start your boat at the end of a race, but you can’t do that
with finite resources.”

In addition to making the case for a circular economy among business
leadersher Foundation is
piloting, testing and producing materials for secondary school teachers based
on systems thinking and “restorative” recycling that can be built into the
design of nearly everything we use, from washing machines through cars and
carpets to packaging. “When people learn about recycling, they learn that they
should be doing less. And everything they’re learning is, at best, just buying
time. It doesn’t inspire creativity and innovation. In the circular economy,
there’s an extraordinary message about what you can do, not what you can’t
do. And that message comes through in the classroom and in the boardroom.”

MacArthur recounts how, in front of a class of teachers, she takes what
looks like a plastic bag, stuffs it into a glass of hot water, watches the bag
dissolve and then drinks the nutrient-filled contents of the glass: a
show-and-tell of how design for a circular economy can feed (in this case,
literally) the future. The teachers, she says, “are not used to seeing that; they’re
not used to the idea of a circular economy. It’s an exciting way to teach.” And
what they’re learning, at the same time, is a notion that is central to a
circular economy: that consumers pay for performance, not for the material product.
“You look at how you can design something so that you can re-sell and re-manufacture
it.

“The idea of the circular economy is an enabler for young people—and for businesses,” says MacArthur. “The more creative they are, the better. That’s what it’s all about.”